“Daniel Kahneman may well have had more influence on investing than anyone else who wasn’t a professional investor.” That’s a considerable statement, especially coming from Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Zweig, also known as The Intelligent Investor. But considering Kahneman’s life’s work, it’s convincing. Kahneman – a psychologist at Princeton and the 2002 winner of the Nobel Prize in economics …
Peter Brill and Wendy Lewis: World Travelers & Thoughtful People
Park Piedmont clients are entrepreneurs and homemakers, world-renowned physicians and award-winning authors and directors, the founders of startups and the owners of closely-held businesses, and young professionals and retirees. The common thread is that they are thoughtful, intelligent people doing good and interesting things with their lives. Today we’re kicking off a new series to help our clients get to know other …
Money, Meet Meaning: Introducing a New Podcast
April 15, Tax Day: the culmination of our annual season of data-gathering, number-crunching, and spiritual reflection. What’s that? You don’t use tax season as an opportunity for self-examination and renewal? OK, fine – me neither. Tax Season is a time-intensive, laborious grind, and you’re no doubt in good company if you offer a grunt of thanksgiving when it mercifully wraps up. In many ways, …
An Ongoing Battle Between Facts and Vibes
Here’s something curious. This week The Wall Street Journal published the results of a survey it conducted with several thousand swing state voters. The paper asked about political preferences, naturally, but its questions extended into the survey respondents’ views of the economy. According to the Journal, about three-quarters of respondents said inflation had moved in the wrong direction over the …
How Much Do Our Pets Cost?
To say that the Park Piedmont team is a group of animal lovers would be an understatement. Tom, Nate, George, and Heather are all dog owners, while Sam, Leslie and I are owned by our cats. Catching a glimpse of someone’s pet while on a Zoom meeting is frequently a highlight of our workday. We also love it when we get …
TCJA Tax Update
If the words “tax code” immediately make your eyes glaze over … well, you wouldn’t be alone. Jeff Sommer of The New York Times recently wrote that, unfortunately, “navigating the byzantine U.S. tax rules … may be enough of a headache. But you can count on fresh tax stress coming from Washington not far down the road.” That’s because significant parts of the Federal …
Your Best Investment
What’s the best investment you’ve ever made? Reflexively, some might point to a particular stock in their portfolio – maybe they took a flier on Berkshire Hathaway a few decades ago or bought Amazon when it was primarily an online book seller. Some lucky few might shine their light on something more tangible: a garage sale masterpiece or a rookie baseball card of …
Black Swans & The Certainty of Uncertainty
Rarely but inevitably, a single event will flip the world upside down – the kind of improbable, unexpected thing that occurs on a day just like any other, but then alters life as we know it. Sometimes that thing is devastating, such as a freak accident or the sudden death of a loved one. Sometimes it’s delightful – a newfound …
The Random Quilt of Wall Street
A picture is worth a thousand words, as the old saying goes. The “quilt” chart below, prepared by JP Morgan Asset Management, colorfully demonstrates many of the points Park Piedmont Advisors has made over the years. Several of them derive from Burton Malkiel’s 1973 classic, A Random Walk Down Wall Street: While the stock and bond markets have produced positive returns …
2023 Year-End Market Update
We had no idea what the 2023 year-end market update would look like a year ago. As it turns out, the year ended with US stocks up 26 percent, as measured by the US Total Stock Market index fund. The total bond market was up 6.8 percent. Inflation cooled in late 2023 to a 3.4 percent annual inflation rate – …